A journey of rediscovery
We believe in building brands with purpose. We try to bring that lens to every project we tackle, big or small. True purpose matters, to everyone we work with. But it’s rare that an organisation commits to an exploration of purpose as deeply as Here.
We made the initial connection at Meaning Conference in 2014. Here, then called Brighton & Hove Integrated Care Service (BICS), was experiencing a rapid period of change.
It had been founded in 2008, by a small group of experienced healthcare professionals who were curious about why we spend lots of money on specialised care for a small percentage of the population. They could see how spending more money early on could positively impact the care journeys of more people, while also saving on costs in the long-run.
Thinking differently
BICS was born as a not-for-profit social enterprise, owned by local health practitioners and its staff. The team began by taking on referral management in Brighton & Hove, helping patients navigate their journey between referral from a GP and treatment from a specialist service.
The success of their approach — thinking differently about how to make systems work better for patients — led them to bid as a partner for more contracts and projects. These spanned primary care, mental health, dementia diagnosis and physical care, within Brighton & Hove as well as across Sussex and in London.
With that success came growth, and many of the challenges that scale introduces. They were working with many more staff, across increasingly diverse partnerships and areas of healthcare, and in multiple locations.
As they did, a new need emerged: to tell a powerful story that made sense of the work, to ever growing numbers of stakeholders coming into contact with the organisation.
Deeper than that, they needed to define and reconnect with their true purpose.
Reframing purpose
At the same time, the leadership within BICS were rethinking what working at scale should look like within the organisation. Encouraged by Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, there was a renewed energy to create non-bureaucratic solutions. Solutions that would work better for people, whether they were receiving care or giving it. And this was throwing the focus back to being able to connect with and respond to ‘the why’ at every level of the operation – what Laloux calls “evolutionary purpose”.
When we met in early 2015 to discuss the possibilities for helping BICS tell their story, founder Zoe Nicholson brought us a gift — Laloux’s book. For us, it quickly became clear that this wouldn’t be like any brand project we had worked on before. The practices — of wholeness at work, of self-organisation, of continually exploring purpose — felt exciting, and true to the spirit of the way we wanted to work. And yet they also asked discomfiting questions of our processes, demanding a more generous and much more collaborative approach to understanding the opportunity.
So began one of the richest phases of discovery work we’ve undertaken.
Not only did we conduct one-to-one interviews, surveys and the expected workshops and immersion sessions. We also joined the BICS team for a two-day retreat with mindfulness experts Joel and Michelle Levey, to explore individual and shared purpose.
We facilitated storytelling across the organisation. We took our thoughts for a day-long walk in the Sussex woodlands, to help settle on our recommendations.
At every stage, we were invited to look at the process and ask — does this serve our purpose? Could we do something different? Could we do something more valuable for all participants, just as the team at BICS seeks to do with their services in healthcare?
Articulating vision
Our journey brought us to a number of ways of expressing the organisation’s essential purpose. In the spirit of collaboration, these were explored and honed down by a working group drawn from all areas within the organisation, and a pairing of two statements of purpose were put out for a consultation to all members (made up of staff and local healthcare practitioners who are the organisation’s shareholders), using the ‘advice process’ principles advocated by organisations such as Burtzoorg.
The statement of purpose that was finally adopted was Care unbound: to create more possibilities for care in every moment. This captured the sense of possibility and creativity that we found throughout the organisation, and the way that they understand care to be relevant outside the confines of a clinical interaction — in a crucial phone call, an appointment letter or an interaction with a colleague.
To do justice to the extent of what we’d learnt about matters to the team, we also created statements of belief and commitment that support and enact the purpose.
Having taken the time for this deep exploration, and having arrived at a powerful rallying cry, there was an appetite to move quickly to communicate it to the world.
A flexible identity
With this newly articulated, boundless sense of purpose, it was clear that the name, tying the organisation to a limited geography and the jargon of ‘integration’, was no longer fit for purpose. But there were nerves about how a change would go down with partners. A balance had to be struck between the flexibility that’s so important to their change-making spirit and the commitment they have to primary care in Brighton & Hove.
‘Here’ came from leftfield but worked beautifully. It spoke of the quality of presence that they value so highly, and which enables them to connect authentically with the work they do. It allowed their presence to bend to different contexts: ‘Here in Brighton’, ‘Here in wellbeing’, and so on.
Our visual creative drew on the energy and spirit of Here. The literal unbinding of the ‘H’ in the logo provides the space for a multitude of possibilities. Space to show the qualities within the organisation and within the people who make it.
Inspiring ownership
As the visual identity developed, we returned to the set of beliefs and commitments we had created together — and we crafted bespoke icons inspired by them. Each member of the organisation can now choose which design to put on their business card, enabling them to express themselves and Here in the way that resonates most strongly for them.
Applying the brand digitally
Here sought a digital presence that brings together the everyday needs of those who interact with the organisation, and content that allows its purpose to live and breathe. Not only did this website need to be accessible, responsive and professional, but also as full of life as the rest of the brand.
Through a series of interactive workshops and planning sessions, we created a new information architecture and plan for digital content. We all wanted to make it simpler to show what services Here provides, and quicker for people using the services to find what they really need. So we designed service pages with a consistent hierarchy, stripping out unnecessary information, and a linear flow for easier navigation whether the site’s accessed from a desktop, tablet or mobile browser.
A culture of storytelling
With Here’s purpose surfacing through the stories of individuals, those stories felt crucial to bringing the organisation’s identity to life. This was a major departure from Here’s previously low-key, generally formal external communications.
The team also knew that they needed ‘more content’. But true to the spirit of the wider organisation, they were reluctant to put in a conventional comms infrastructure if a more elegant, self-managed solution could be found.
So instead of building a new team, they looked at coaxing a stronger culture of sharing and harvesting stories across the organisation. Drawing on Neo’s expertise and our shared network in Brighton & Hove, Here put together a plan to create the initial burst of content to launch the new site at the same time as building support for storytelling — principles, workshops and guidance — for the longer term.
Capturing real people
Producing much more visual content was crucial to Here’s new communications, and to telling its stories engagingly and authentically.
Our photography brief was simple — let’s capture real moments with real people. No staged photographs, no direct interaction with the camera. We worked closely with our collaborator Ali Tollervey to put this into practice — and the results help Here come alive in a way that has surprised and thrilled all of us.
To guide the continued connection with the Here identity, we brought all of this work together in a set of concise guidelines. These enable the Here team to create and share stories in the right verbal and visual language, underpinning the way that Here looks and feels into the future.
Challenging the status quo
We’ve learned so much about the potential for purpose to inspire engagement with a communication project. It’s changed the way we think at Neo.
And it’s increased our appetite to work with unconventional organisations who are challenging the status quo in the way they organise, as well as in the impact they are trying to make in the world.
After a brilliant journey, it’s Here at last. We can’t wait to find out what happens next.
Visit wearehere.org.uk
